In a traditional management structure, a manager may oversee many employees, but each employee reports to only one manager. From the employee's perspective, there is a one-to-one relationship between the employee and the manager. In this system, the employee understands that his or her manager will be assigning tasks and conducting performance reviews. Because the manager is the only person assigning tasks to an employee, the traditional management structure allows the manager to identify the relative workloads of each employee to determine who should receive the next task. The manager is also aware of the responsibilities of each of his or her employees, and is able to evaluate the employees on the basis of their performance.
Today, many companies have foregone the traditional management structure and adopted a functional responsibility management structure. Under this approach, each manager is responsible for one or more business functions. Employees may be assigned tasks that impact several business functions. Thus, employees find themselves having to satisfy more than one manager when completing a given task. In effect, the employees now have a one-to-many relationship with their managers. Further complicating the arrangement, the managers now have a much larger pool of employees reporting to them.
From an employee's perspective, it can be difficult to determine who will review the final work product. It can also be difficult to satisfy the needs of one functional manager when the needs of another conflict. From a manager's perspective, this structure presents a greater competition for resources than the traditional system. It also becomes difficult for a manager to determine the relative workloads of the employees.
It is apparent that without a means for tracking the relationships between business functions and employee tasks, the functional responsibility management structure can create a great amount of confusion for both managers and employees. This confusion results in an often significant waste of resources through, for example, meetings to determine which employee is responsible for which task, and which manager is responsible for which portion of that task.
Prior art approaches to tracking business relationships include organizational charts, Gantt charts, and Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) charts. Organizational charts may effectively describe the one-to-one relationships of the traditional management structure, but they are unable to adequately represent the one-to-many relationships in a functional responsibility management structure. Similarly, Gantt and PERT charts primarily relate to the relative timing of events rather than the business relationship between the events. They also fail to adequately present a breakdown of business functions or tasks.